Hi - this is Srinivasan Sampathkumar from Triplicane. I have a passion for Marine Insurance, Cricket and of course Temples especially Thiruvallikkeni.
From Sept 2009, I am posting my thoughts in this blog ; From July 2010, my postings on Temples & Tamil are on my other blog titled "Kairavini Karayinile " (www.tamil.sampspeak.in)
Request you to keep providing your feedback which will help me improve and present better.

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Ants
are social insects of the family Formicidae; along with the related wasps and bees, belong
to the order Hymenoptera. More than 12,500 out of an estimated total of 22,000
species have been classified. Ants form colonies that range in size from a few
dozen predatory individuals living in small natural cavities to highly
organised colonies which may occupy large territories and consist of millions
of individuals.Fire ants are a variety
of stinging ants with over 285 species worldwide. They have several common
names, including ginger ants, tropical fire ants and red ants.

Set in the modern
times, an elderly veteran visits the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial
with his family. Upon seeing one particular grave, he falls to his knees
overcome with emotion. The scene then shifts to the morning of June 6, 1944, as
American soldiers land on Omaha Beach as part of the Normandy Invasion. They
suffer heavy losses in assaulting German positions defended by artillery and
machine guns. Captain John H. Miller of the 2nd Ranger Battalion assembles a
group to penetrate the German defenses, leading to a breakout from the beach.
Elsewhere on the beach, a dead soldier is face down in the bloody surf; his
pack is stenciled Ryan, S.

In Washington,
D.C., at the U.S. War Department, General George Marshall learns that three of
the four brothers of the Ryan family were killed in action and that the fourth
son, James, has been parachuted somewhere in Normandy. After reading Abraham
Lincoln's Bixby letter aloud for his staff, he orders that James Ryan be found
and returned home immediately. Three days after D-Day, Miller receives orders
to find Ryan and bring him back from the front. He assembles six men from his
company— they move out to Neuville,
where they meet a squad from the 101st Airborne Division, in pursuit, they eventually encounter a friend of James
Ryan, who tells them that he is defending an important bridge in the town of
Ramelle.

Saving
Private Ryan is a 1998 American epic war drama film directed by Steven
Spielberg. M Set during the Invasion of Normandy in World War II, the film is
notable for its graphic portrayal of war, and for the intensity of its opening
27 minutes, which includes a depiction of the Omaha Beach assault during the
Normandy landings.The film received
widespread critical acclaim, winning several awards for film, cast, and crew,
as well as earning significant returns at the box office.

It's a
scene familiar from countless war films — the brave soldiers risking their
lives to carry an injured comrade to safety, the noble casualty insisting they
go on and leave him to die.But it’s
not human warriors who act so
selflessly.A study has shown that ants
do exactly the same in battle.Live
Science has this interesting article that a species of warmongering sub-Saharan
ant not only rescues its battle-wounded soldiers but also treats their
injuries.

This strikingly
unusual behavior raises the survival rate for injured ants from a mere 20
percent to 90 percent, according to new research published Feb. 13 in the
journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.These same ants, a species called Megaponera analis, were observed last
year bringing their injured back to the nest, but no one knew what happened to
the wounded ants after that, said study leader Erik Frank, a postdoctoral
researcher at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Now, it's clear that the
ants get extra TLC after being saved from the battlefield.

M. analis is a
nondescript-looking species that lives in colonies of several hundred to over a
thousand ants. They're skilled raiders, sending out columns of several hundred
ants to attack termite nests and drag termite corpses back to their own nests
for a feast. These raids, however, often come with a cost: ants with lost or
crushed limbs, or even ants limping home with tenacious termites clinging to
their bodies.To find out the real
happening, the researchers staged raids between the ants and captive
termites, observing how the ants responded to heavily injured ants with five
limbs crushed or amputated versus lightly injured ants with only two lost or
damaged limbs.They found that in the
vast majority of cases, severely injured ants were left to die on the
battlefield. This version of ant triage wasn't at the behest of the rescuers,
Frank said; instead, ants with five missing limbs flailed, rotated and
generally refused to cooperate with their rescuers. Ants with two lost limbs,
on the other hand, curled up into easy-to-carry balls and let themselves be
taken home.

"If you're
able to stand up, you're very likely not too injured and you are still useful
to the colony, so you should be able to call for help and be rescued,"
Frank said. Once back at the nest, healthy ants would attend to the wounded,
licking their injuries for sometimes up to minutes at a time. Ants that were
prevented from getting this treatment had an 80-percent chance of dying within
24 hours, the researchers found, whereas ants that were cared for had only a
10-percent chance of death. To find out what was killing the injured, untreated
ants, the researchers relocated some to a sterile environment and found that
only 20 percent died, indicating that infections are probably the biggest risk
for injured ants.

Any uninjured ant
seems capable of providing the licking treatment — there's no indication of
dedicated ant "medics," Frank said — but it's not yet clear whether
the treatment prevents infections or actively treats them. Either way, the
behavior is exciting to see because it's extremely rare to observe any
individual animal treating another's wounds in any species, Frank said. It's
especially counterintuitive in ants, because the tendency is to think that ant
individuals are easily replaced cogs in the machinery of the colony, he said.
But in M. analis, colonies aren't that large, and only a dozen or so baby ants
are born each day, Frank said.